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Post-secondary students’ misconceptions about limits
Author
Syed Mansoor Jaffar
Supervisor
Quigley, Martyn
Jaguthsing Dindyal
Abstract
This study set out to investigate what misconceptions arise when students study limits and why such misconceptions occur when the students encounter items on limits. The participants in this study were a group of post-secondary students from a university. Two research questions were set up. The first research question was: What kinds of misconceptions do post-secondary students have on limits? The second research question was: Why do the misconceptions occur? The design of this study was qualitative because the objective of this study was to find explanations from the student perspective, to why misconceptions occurred in the study of limits. Consequently, the data were collected by testing, interviewing and surveying post-secondary students. Another group of students from a different university was also interviewed to establish a benchmark and to analyse whether there was a set of misconceptions that was common to both groups of students. The common misconceptions were subsequently termed core misconceptions. The data revealed that generally, students regarded the limit value as: a ‘function’, an ‘approximation’, ‘white or black’ dot on the graph and ‘a substitution process’. The misconceptions were found to be due to difficulties in interpreting different functions and difficulties in recognizing different function representations. Hence, inadequate knowledge of both functions and function representations resulted in retrieval errors, incorrect internal representations and the inability to reify. Language difficulties contributed to the misconceptions too.
Date Issued
2011
Call Number
QA303.3 Sye
Date Submitted
2011